Azure Updates: OpenAI Service; Copilots with AI Studio; Azure skills

With the mid-point of the year, Microsoft picked up the volume of its announcements for the start of July. Director of Product Marketing, Andy Beatman, explored ways to build business velocity with Azure OpenAI Service. AI increasingly allows Microsoft customers to move more rapidly, automating repetitive processes, conducting real-time and predictive analysis, detecting fraud, providing personalized marketing, or optimizing supplies and enhancing customer outreach. He shared a few concrete examples of these changes now taking place. Akbank is using OpenAI Service to save up to three minutes per customer interaction with AI chatbots, whereas VOCALLS, a Czech Republic and UK-based company is deploying conversational AI for customer service companies. 

Touching on similar themes, General Manager David Seda looked into how customers can build their own copilot with AI Studio. Recently, Vodafone used AI Studio to modernize its existing TOBi chatbot, changing to a new agent dubbed SuperAgent. The chatbot is capable of summarizing complex calls into brief summaries stored in the CRM. Similarly, American tax prep service H&R Block developed AI Tax Assist to streamline online tax filing. 

“Azure AI is where innovators are creating the future, and we’re continuing to invest in our AI Studio platform to provide cutting edge services and tools to our customers,” Seda wrote. "As we look ahead to what’s next for custom copilots, we’re excited about how agents, like Azure OpenAI Assistants application programming interface (API) can accelerate and improve custom copilot development. Using Azure OpenAI models, developers can provide specific instructions to tune AI capabilities and access multiple tools in parallel, including code interpreter and file search, or custom tools built and accessed through function calling."